Thursday, March 31, 2016

A few weeks ago now I had the good fortune to attend a local card show. I posted the first portion of my spoils earlier this month, time to wrap it up with the rest today. Today's round of pick-ups is brought to you by the woman I've begun to affectionately refer to (at least in my head) as the "Dollar Box Grandma".

I've purchased cards from her at least once before, so I probably should know her name at this point, but I don't. All I know is she's easily 70 years old, and she's got some discount boxes.

Usually I stick to her dollar boxes, but at this particular show I had a bit more time so I started with her quarter cards and worked my way up. At 25 cents I probably overpaid for this Hanley Ramirez, but at the time it was my very first 2015 Bowman's Best card so I went for it.

Same with this one, but again this was back when 2016 Topps had only recently been released so I didn't mind shelling out a quarter for this Brian Johnson rookie card. All of the other quarter cards I picked up went out in trade packages, let's move onto some 50 cent pick-ups...

This Wade Miley is a Rainbow Foil parallel. Amazingly, I received the exact same card in a PWE from Dimebox Nick this week. No worries though, that copy will be passed along to a good home soon.

I grabbed a couple of other 50 cent Rainbow Foil parallels as well with Hanley Ramirez...

...and one of the most talked-about cards of 2016 so far, the Jose Bautista bat flip card. I don't plan on buying any 2016 Topps wax so I was pleased to find a copy of this one.

Got my very first Sky Blue Refractor with this Manuel Margot. These look pretty slick in hand if you're a fan of shiny.

Grabbed a couple of new Matt Barnes cards, first a Heritage Minor League release from his time with the single A Salem Red Sox...

...and then this little acetate number from last year's High Tek set. The sheer number of these things is ridiculous, and I believe this one is a "Confetti Diffractor" or something silly like that (not kidding). Either way, an acetate card serial-numbered to /99 was too good a deal to pass up at 50 cents.

Deven Marrero is still with the organization, and actually saw his first 50 or so MLB at-bats last season. Even hit his first home run!

One more Salem Red Sox card for today, this one featuring a nice awkward photo of outfielder Jackie Bradley Jr.

These next two I was particularly happy with. For 75 cents each I was able to pick up a nice new pair of Mookie Betts cards, the first being this Red Framed parallel from Panini Diamond Kings...

...and the other a classic Gold parallel from 2015 Topps.

Of course, I hit the dollar boxes as well. There are only a couple 2,000ct monster boxes of cards priced at a buck per, but there are some real deals to be had. Again, the majority of what I picked up are cards destined for others but I did okay for myself too.

This one was kind of dumb honestly. I guess it was the allure of the serial-numbered parallel, or maybe the lingering memories I still have of that no-hitter early in Clay's career.

I've posted a few Trevor Gretzky cards before, and couldn't resist this Blue Refractor (/250) of the Great One's son.

Here's another Manuel Margot, this time a Bowman Silver Ice parallel. He is now in the San Diego organization, having been a part of the trade that brought Craig Kimbrel to Boston this off-season.

Picked up a couple Rockets from 2004 Diamond Kings. This one is the Sepia variety...

...and this one is the Bronze Framed Sepia. I wasn't collecting at the time, but this seems like one of those sets with entirely too many variations of each card.

I'm not normally a huge mini guy, so why on Earth did I spend a buck on this David Ortiz?

Well, it's a "no number back". I believe these are supposedly limited to 50 copies each, or something along those lines.

There were a few of those no number backs to be had, so I ended up with Mike Napoli...

...and Dallas Keuchel to accompany Ortiz in my mini binder. I like this one in particular since it's from Dallas' Cy Young season.

These Gallery of Greats inserts from last year's flagship set are absolutely beautiful in my opinion. There was a version in the Topps Chrome set as well, but from what I can tell the ones from the flagship release are slightly more expensive/desirable. That may only be because the flagship cards contain retired stars, and the Chrome version has current players.

I ended up with five of these, Clemens because it's a new Red Sox card, the other four because they're players I just enjoy collecting.

It's a little hard to tell in the scans, but the borders on these are a raised frame. That, combined with the way that they used foil on the backgrounds but not the players themselves, really gives them some pop.

This is definitely one of the more attractive of the scant few Clemente cards that I own. A dollar well spent!

My favorite of the bunch is Nolan Ryan, a player I collected heavily in my first go-round as a kid.

Getting near the end here, just two cards to go. Both of them are variations from the 2015 Topps set. I'm a total sucker for the variations Topps has been issuing for years now. I don't really care for a difficult-to-see sparkle variation, and things like stat variations on the back don't really do it for me. If it's photo variation like this one though I'm sold!

Last card for today, another nice image variation of the new Red Sox closer from last year's Update set.

I'm very pleased with the cards I came home with from this last show, and even more pleased that I ended up with a ton of good stuff to share with other collectors. Some of that has already made its way out, others will be shipped in the near future. Hopefully I'll have a chance to dig through these boxes again soon!

Wednesday, March 30, 2016

I've learned that for the most part, I'm not a retail wax guy. It's very tempting whenever I'm in Target to cruise through the card aisle by the registers and take a peek at what's in stock. More often than not though, when the pack ripping is done I haven't had quite as much fun as I envisioned when I plopped down $20 plus tax. For this reason I've yet to cave so far in 2016, and have been buying singles I like from COMC instead.

The problem is that I really do enjoy opening packs. It's how I started collecting the first time around, more than 25 years ago (yikes, that is alarming to type!). My solution for the most part is to find discounted wax. If it's a bust, or doesn't provide much enjoyment, I don't feel as guilty. I guess it also pleases my "frugal" side.

Well, in the Dave and Adam's Card World order I placed earlier this year, I got a deal that definitely did just that:

What you see there is a whole lot of unopened 2013-14 Score hockey (and a couple of opened packs as well). This set has continued to grow on me over time since its release a couple of years ago. I appreciate the simple design, and the unique photographs on many of the cards. With a checklist 750 cards deep (650 cards from this series, plus another 100 released later with Rookie Anthology), but no crazy expensive or valuable cards, it seems like a challenging yet approachable set to build. Helps that I also had at least a couple hundred cards already.

Unbelievably, the clearance sale deal the weekend I placed my order was 24 12-card packs for $6.95.

I wouldn't say I was quite as excited as Tyler Seguin here when I first saw the deal, but I was pleased enough to put two lots in my cart for checkout. 48 packs for $13.90, which comes out to 29 cents per pack, between 2 and 3 cents per card.

Because I tend to hoard unopened packs for some weird reason, I decided to split the stash into three sets of 16 packs, and have only opened the first 16 so far. I'll try not to show you too many cards from a set that's already been out there for some time now, but I did pick out a few favorites to share.

There are a whole lot of celebration photos in this set for some reason. Enough so that I could see it bothering some collectors. I think they're interesting, and do a good job of displaying the emotion in the game, as opposed to another generic, tightly-cropped pre-game warm-up shot.

A checklist organized by team has been the standard for Upper Deck's yearly flagship set for some time now, and the folks at Panini followed suit here. The original Score sets that I collected as a kid weren't like this, but oh well.

With a checklist as large as this one is, there are some boring base cards for sure, of subjects that even die-hard hockey fans have probably very little knowledge of. For every one of those though, there's a gem like this Dan Cleary.

Another great celebration shot, with a photo-bomb by Ryan Nugent-Hopkins.

We've seen similar images to this one used on a few different Canadiens cards in recent years.

I realize not everyone is big on Panini, but when they had a license I really did like a lot of their sets. I mean this is just a great hockey card. Malkin perfectly framed in celebration, with the hometown crowd going nuts in the background, and a dejected Lightning goaltender and defender behind him. To me, a perfect example of a simple base card that I enjoy as much as, if not more than, many hits.

In looking through the images I selected, it's becoming obvious that I have a bias for the horizontally-oriented cards.

One last lowly common from the main portion of the set. I'll put this up against any photo in this year's Upper Deck set.

There's a nice 10-card "Season Highlights" subset towards the end of the checklist. Sid the Kid here is the only one I ended up with so far. Kinda stretching it a little when "fifth fastest to 400 assists" warrants a card. Not saying it's not an impressive feat, and Crosby is one of the more talented and successful players out there, but still.

At the end of the checklist are 60 Hot Rookies which I believe are inserted every other pack. I didn't pull any super desirable rookies from this first lot of packs, but wanted to show one nonetheless. Hopefully in the next batch!

In each pack you'll find one Gold Parallel (two every once in a while). Doesn't bother me much, adds another element of interest to each pack and with a dozen cards per pack doesn't harm your set-building quest all that much.

A couple more nice photographs from the Gold parallels I pulled. Looks like Jimmy Howard's gonna make the stop here.

In this case, I'd say a sure-fire goal for Tanner Glass.

There aren't a lot of inserts, and honestly most of them are pretty uninspiring to me. This The Franchise Sean Couturier card is sitting in my trade box now for example.

I did get one insert that I will be keeping though, a Future Franchise (oh, the irony) card of defenseman Dougie Hamilton.

Oh yeah, and I also pulled an autograph:

Alright, if you want to get technical it's a guy with 5 career NHL games to his credit, who's now playing back in Sweden, and who has one of the laziest signatures I've ever seen. Nilstorp did win the Calder Cup with Dallas' AHL affiliate the same year this card came out, so that has to count for something right? This one's available if any of my trading partners are for some reason interested...

I've had a lot of fun opening these so far, and best of all I'm now sitting at 385 out of 650 cards for the low series set, with this first round of packs taking me well past the 50% mark as far as that goes. I've got a healthy stack of doubles building too if anyone's working on this one?

Tuesday, March 29, 2016

What: 1959 Topps - #9 - Paul GielWhere: COMCHow Much?: $.65Why?: After watching the Bruins once again display their utter inability to put the puck in the net tonight, I'm starting to look forward to baseball season already. This Paul Giel is in better shape than most of the cards in my slowly growing '59 Topps set, so 65 cents seemed like a fair enough price...

Monday, March 28, 2016

Today I've got another great trade package to show the contents of, this one from Jared of Catching Up With Collecting. This package is baseball-heavy, which is perfect with just one week to go until the first Red Sox game of 2016!

Jared sent a whole slew of Red Sox cards my way. Some of them I had already, which is no problem as they're in a pile slated to be sent back out to other collectors. Others were brand new to me. For the sake of brevity (still kind of failed at this), I'm going to show only the cards that were new additions to my collection here. Like that awesome Cardtoons Roger Clemens card you see above. Random to say the least, but I love it.

Here's a nice Prizm rookie of pitcher Allen Webster. He was dealt to the Diamondbacks after the 2014 season in the trade that brought Wade Miley to Boston. Not a bad trade for the Sox in hindsight, as Miley was probably the most reliable overall starter with Boston last year and Webster is apparently going to play in Korea in 2016 after having been picked up and then subsequently dumped by the Pirates earlier this off-season.

Believe it or not, this represents my very first card from 1997 Topps Finest. Was just starting high school at the time so baseball cards were not on my radar whatsoever.

My impression of them in hand is the same as my impression of them when first seeing them on the web...not impressed. I'll still be looking for any and all of the Red Sox cards though, so this pair is appreciated.

Jared likes catcher cards, and is a Fisk collector specifically. You'll be seeing a couple of other cards of Carlton further down.

I also got a pair of new rookie cards from the 2015 Diamond Kings release.

I'm definitely on the side of those that think Panini should get an MLB license. These cards look pretty nice, but being able to use team names and logos would have put them over the top.

This one definitely brought a smile to my face as I was thumbing through the stack. I was back into full-on rabid baseball fan mode by the time Dice-K debuted and I still remember all the hoopla surrounding his supposed "gyro-ball". He never lived up to the lofty expectations, but that's alright as it makes his cardboard cheap to scoop up after the fact. This Triple Threads card is super thick and numbered to a ridiculous /1350.

There was a brief point in time where I tried to acquire as many cards as I could from Adrian Gonzalez's brief stint with Boston. Guess I never managed to get my hands on this die-cut from Bowman Platinum at the time.

Like the majority of collectors at the time, I went nuts over the 2011 Topps Diamond Anniversary parallels. Hard to believe I'm still working on tracking down all the Red Sox variations to this day. A complete set of these would look pretty amazing in a binder, but the reality is that I don't have the time to pursue something like that. For now I'll stick to the Red Sox mostly.

I don't have really any recollection of Jose Malave, who appeared in just 45 games in his MLB career, all with the Red Sox between 1996 and 1997.

On the other hand, here's a guy who I remember fondly. It seems like Coco Crisp's best cards have come in his post-Red Sox days (his 2013 and 2014 Topps flagship cards are both great).

I always forget that the 2003 Upper Deck Victory cards had rounded corners. A strange design choice, and I'm not sure it works so well, but I'm thankful for the new Manny regardless.

Here are a couple more extra Fisks from Jared, a Baseball Highlight Sketches insert from 2012 Allen & Ginter...

...and a really elegant base card from 2007 Upper Deck SP Legendary Cuts. I got back into collecting early in 2007, and I still recall buying a pack of this stuff at the hobby shop at the time. Pulled four base cards, immediately realized high end packs weren't for me, and never looked back.

Adam Hyzdu played just 29 games with the Red Sox before being dealt off to the Padres. This is my first Red Sox card with him as the subject, so I can cross another name off of the all-time roster!

A classic Gold parallel from the 2008 flagship set, featuring some free advertising from my bottled water of choice, Poland Springs!

There was a good start towards a team set of 1998 Bowman Chrome in this delivery. Some guys I hadn't heard of, others I had. Pete Munro here never pitched for the Red Sox, but he did make appearances for both Toronto and Houston at the MLB level.

Here's a name I think nearly every baseball fan recognizes, Bret Saberhagen.

I've talked about Dernell Stenson, who was murdered while playing in the Arizona Fall League, numerous times before.

Jay Yennaco advanced as far as AAA Pawtucket within the Red Sox farm system. He blew out his arm and underwent Tommy John surgery, but never reached the Majors with any organization. Just one of the many thousands who got oh so close I guess.

Joe DePastino has two career MLB games to his credit, both during the 2003 season with the New York Mets.

Aside from featuring a relatively interesting image, this Steve Lomasney card is cool in that it's my first proper Red Sox card of Steve (I have one other, but it's a minor league release). Steve was a local high school star (Peabody, MA) in both baseball and football. Injuries derailed his career somewhat, but he did get to play in a single game with Boston in 1999, when he came in as a defensive substitute for Jason Varitek.

Cole Liniak appeared in 15 career MLB games, all with the Cubs, between the 1999 and 2000 seasons. That's a wrap as far as the '98 Bowman Chrome cards go.

Second new Jose Malave of this package...

I've got a bunch of the '94 Pinnacle Museum Collection parallels, but comparatively few of the plain old base cards.

Here's a new one from one of the most busy sets of the '90s, 1995 Fleer.

Flair Showcase is one of those annoying sets with multiple different iterations of each card. This Brian Rose, according to my crack research, is a "Row 3" version.

Jared even tossed a couple of non-licensed, certified autos into the package! Jon Still never advanced further than AA, and was out of pro baseball after 2009. Regardless, this one pairs nicely with the base version of the card which I had previously.

Final baseball card of the post is this bright and bold autograph of pitcher Alex Wilson. I liked Alex out of the bullpen during his brief time with Boston. He was sent to Detroit in the deal that brought Yoenis Cespedes to Boston before last season. Apparently the Tigers like him as well, as he appeared in an impressive 59 games out of the pen last year.

Jared tossed in a few New England Patriots cards as well.

While football is not really my thing when it comes to collecting cards, it's not because I don't like the sport. I've been following the Patriots religiously for more than 15 years, but baseball and hockey keep me busy enough on the card collecting front.

I do appreciate getting a few Pats cards from time to time though, and these are welcome additions to my small football/basketball/non-sports box.

Some of these guys are from the days before I really watched closely, but as a New England sports fan I still recognize names like Terry Glenn and Dave Meggett!

Cool, the Metal Universe sets existed in football too!

This one's alright, but I like the Coates above better.

I got a pair from '99 Finest as well, receiver Terry Glenn...

...and once again, TE Ben Coates. Both of these still have the protective coating on them too, bonus for an OCD personality like myself.

We'll close out the post here with a pair from 2006 Topps Chrome, running back Corey Dillon...

...and wide-out Chad Jackson. The Pats moved up 16 spots in the draft to get this guy, and looking back on it now he was a certified bust. Guy could run like the wind, but injuries and an inability to learn the playbook sealed his fate.

Jared, thanks for the great package of cards! I don't think I can reciprocate the sheer volume of cards you sent over, but I did a little shopping on COMC for you and will have a few cards headed your way as soon as the order arrives!